Project Description

This project is to design and develop a historical document analysis
system as a computer assistant for musicologists and historians to
help them in their work in studying early western musical manuscripts.
Further we intend to use the resulting system to explore open
questions in historical musicology.

The guiding premise is to construct a system that experts in the field
of musicology can use to study the subject documents and explore
research hypotheses without requiring advanced computer science
expertise. For this reason, features and interfaces of the system are
being designed in close cooperation between computer scientists and
research musicologists.

From a computer science perspective, the system will include the
latest technology in historical document analysis, such as specialised
noise reduction, binarisation, layout analysis, feature extraction and
symbol recognition, word spotting and more. Statistical tools for
clustering and classification will also be provided.

For the present project, it is important not only to use notation
which has been well-studied, but that the book in which it is found is
familiar to many musicologists. For this reason, we have chosen to
focus on the liturgical Office book St. Gallen Stiftbibliothek, Cod.
Sang. 390 / 391, sometimes referred to as “Hartker’s
Antiphoner”, since tradition has it that a recluse monk
named Hartker completed this book at St. Gall sometime around the turn
of the 10th century. A facsimile of this antiphoner was published in
1970 Jacques Forger ed., Antiphonaire de
Hartker, Paléographie musicale II, 1 (Bern, 1970):
67–86.. More recently, the abbey library at St. Gall
joined the Swiss project entitled “e-codices”
which makes digitized JPG images of many valuable books in Swiss
libraries available for free on the internet. Hartker’s Antiphoner is
now accessible online, as part of this initiative.

Hartker’s Antiphoner was recently the subject of a detailed
palaeographic study which found that there are actually at least five
hands represented in the manuscript Kees
Pouderoijen and Ike de Loos, Wer ist Hartker? Die Entstehung des
Hartkerischen Antiphonars, Beiträge zur Gregorianik 47
(2009).. This number was determined by manually inspecting the
forms of each neume and comparing one to another. One goal of this
project is to use a comparatively objective method to confirm or
refute the conclusions of this study.